2019 Trends – Part 2. Upcoming Challenges

05/03/2019

While we’re excited to capitalize on the transitions coming to the market, with change always come new challenges.

In Part 1, we touched on the new technologies driving change in our customers’ worlds – increasing data rates and decreasing network latency requires new approaches in products and process.  At the same time, much like a perfect storm, our customers are faced with a transitioning workforce. Some estimates say that over 200,000 new people are going to enter our industry in the next two to three years. This means that the industry is going to have to invest resources in training and skills for these new workers.

For a supplier, this means thinking about how we can make that transition process less complex. This means placing an added emphasis on our customer experience. When we think about the customer experience at a product level and a business level – we need to focus on ease-of-use in all things. This means that our customer service needs to transition to being proactive to change, instead of just reactive to customers’ problems.  
   
We also have to help our customers get the most out of their investments. Big changes often mean big investments. With many companies being heavily leveraged right now, we want to focus on helping our customers receive a large return on their investments and the best way to do this is by driving down their operational expenses through improving their efficiency in all the areas we touch.

One of our core values at AFL is putting customers first. We want our customers to know that we are going to do whatever we can to help them through the challenges that change will bring in 2019.